I Decided Not To Post The Link I Was Going To Share, And Just Rant, Instead

Well, The Fourth of July was nice. Got to ride on a trailer in a parade, and just not think about stuff. Plus it gave me a chance to get out and be with people, which I don’t do enough of. It helps to get a perspective on people in flesh and blood. So many little nuances you don’t pick up from people online, and of course little comments from friends who mean a lot to me that stick with me, give me something to think about. So, that was nice.

It had struck me that the Fourth was sort of an escape from all of the extremely divisive stuff coming out in the media lately, which just struck me as “how terrible. This is the Fourth of July, we are supposed to be coming together to celebrate our country, and instead right before the Fourth, all of this horribly divisive stuff is coming out, and splitting people up from a common cause.

I saw a battle flag license plate. I saw 3 young black men who had driven down from North Carolina for the weekend. I like to think that I am on friendly terms with all of these different people, with their own perspectives. It pisses me off that it just seems like the politics and propaganda insists on pitting different identity groups one against the other.

So, that brief respite from the daily divisive topics we who spend too much time online watching current events end up reading way too much about. But today’s the Fifth, and it’s back to one divisive topic after another. A Colorado florist being fined and forced to pay for “sensitivity training”. A baker being fined and given a “cease and desist” order to stop talking about why he doesn’t want to make a cake for someone.

As long as we get our information from these outrage-generating machines, it will be harder to see past the anger they have conditioned us to feel about others who are different in some way, who identify with some group more than others, whatever it is. The media is not here to help, that seems sure, to me. They are in business to feed different demographics their targeted diet of slanted information.